On 2016-06-11 05:15, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
On 06/10/2016 08:46 PM, alexmcwhir...@triadic.us wrote:
Squeeze may be stable on x86, but it's quite the contrary on sparc.
Your talking about a release that was so unmaintained on sparc that
they had to pull the
plug on it afterwards.Squeeze crashes on almost all of my sparc gear.
This was the reason i gave up on debian and started working on gentoo
which was much more
stable at the time.
What is that supposed to mean? We "pull plugs" on all old releases.
But that's not related
to SPARC, but just the normal EOL process. Debian's SPARC port called
"sparc" was available
up to including Wheezy. The stability issues that existed were related
to the kernel, not
the whole distribution.
I don't know how switching over to Gentoo would magically fix upstream
kernel problems.
"Pulled the plug" as in future releases of the sparc port ceased in it's
current form (64bit kernel 32 bit userland).
Gentoo would get you kernel ~4.1 IIRC if you track the stable repository
flags. That kernel is leagues ahead of kernel 3.2 as far a stability
goes. Not to say there aren't bugs, because there are quite a few. As
well as applications that don't work and various hacks you'll have to
make to the package system to get a working current version of gcc to
build.
Granted currently it's still a 32 bit userland as my 64 bit userland
patches have not hit upstream.
Would you mind sharing your patches, please? Those might be useful in
Debian, too. Which packages
did you fix?
I'll dig through the relevant one on monday, but 90% of the patches are
to the Gentoo package system (which is also the build system) to support
compiling everything 64 bit.
Off the top of my head...
Disable gold for udev as it was broken on sparc with gcc 4.8.5 -
probably fixed here as gcc is much newer here
rework glibc building to determine the right cpu flags, had to do the
same for openssl. these two apps need to know the actual cpu you're
building for - also most likely fixed here
patch zfs to work on sparc - detailed in my last message. Will get
patches.
enable 64 bit in elftoaout - must be fixed here as silo seems to work
ok.
force silo to build 32 bit. Gentoo has old silo, not sure if that's
still relevant with newer silo versions?
fix google's protobuf, for whatever reason it assumes you're running
solaris if you have a sparc cpu...
that's all i can think of for now. Like i said, pretty small stuff. Most
of the work was getting the packaging system to work.
Oracle linux is compiled for sun4v only, so no sun4u support. It's
behind the times a little, but they are very active in the kernel
space.
Oracle actively supporting SPARC kernel development is actually one of
the the main reasons
why we have stable Linux support on the hardware. Before Oracle joined
kernel development,
it was mostly David Miller working on the SPARC stuff in the kernel
alone.
I posted something about the earlier in reply to another list message.
But yea i definitely agree. Without oracle's contributions there likely
wouldn't be a sparc64 debian or gentoo port in the works. At least not
for anything newer than the early sun4v series (and without a lot of
bugs fixed).
The unstable debian sparc64 port does support generic 64 bit sparc. My
E6K, V210, V215, and Netra X1 are all running it. It may be classified
as unstable, but i
haven't had a crash occur from system instability yet.
There have been recently some issues with kernel 4.6.x, but those have
already reported upstream
to the kernel developers. See the sparclinux LKML list archives for
this month. Otherwise, Debian's
sparc64 is working with none or minor issues only.
Yea im keeping track of some of those, luckily i haven't come across any
of them myself yet.
Adrian
